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macOS Tahoe Review: Spotlight Shines, Liquid Glass Disappoints

I am done with it. They released an Alpha OS as public beta, what is the same as Dev. Beta 4, the worst one for my M4 Pro mini in terms of heat. And I finally realized how ugly and screen space wasting it really is after downgrading.
 
RemedyRabbit said:
I do not understand the strategy behind pushing liquid glass onto every OS.

As Apple have alluded to themselves it’s an attempt to unify the design with visionOS, where it seems that liquid glass works very well in presenting interfaces and controls as tangible floating objects overlaying video passthrough of the surrounding environment.

One immediate glaring issue in translating this to the other OSs is that liquid glass elements which will appear truly 3 dimensional in VR cannot do so on standard screens. So they’re attempting to make some interfaces and controls appear 3D using tried and tested embossing combined with a more modern dynamic transparency effect.

Standard screen design language went through a long phase of having buttons and controls embossed to make them appear physical, to help users clearly identify what they could interact with as they gradually migrated from physical controls into digital controls.

As time has gone on users have grown far more accustomed to screen based interfaces and the need to make controls feel ‘real’ has fallen away as physical controls become less common. As a result screen design language has been simplified, flattening everything out and removing embossed edges to reduce visual clutter, preferring instead to use well laid out concise clearly contrasted controls. It is widely accepted that this has made screen based interfaces better to use, and UX has been improved.
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I would have wanted Apple's new design language to be influenced not by their work on visionOS, but by their work on CarPlay Ultra and that quite pretty and more flat look.
 
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Smartuser said:
Yeah, cool, I have astigmatism too and I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't need any particular contrast. Maybe there's different types of astigmatism, the regular and the anti-Apple one.
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There may be hate here but the few comment I've read and am seeing on this topic re the changes to macOS UI are critical with good some points made.
 
JohnC1959 said:
Wouldn't it be nice if firing several top people really was a way to make a company better. Obviously there's at least as much a chance that would make things worse.

Anyway, I'll never base how I think a new release is or will be from comments here as they skew WAY negative compared to the general public. So far the biggest negative I can see so far is maybe readability issues with the liquid glass and it's looking like there may be enough settings to tweak that to the likes of most users.

Time will tell, but I prefer to assume the best until I actually use it.
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Agreed, firing random people won't solve much. But, firing and hiring the correct people for the correct job will absolutely help things and have a much higher chance of getting things "fixed" over at Apple versus doing nothing or leaving the teams as-is. That's all I'm saying and think.
I do think though that there are some key positions there that need to be reviewed, maybe most positions need more detailed and more frequent reviews? I'm not sure exactly what the problem is there, other than just declining products and services pretty much across their lineup.

I also think the board should be looked at carefully too. A I said and do believe, there are some key positions, some executive-level, that need to be seriously considered. And yes, I do think that when things are bad, that a decent amount of changes can definitely improve things, or make them worse like you said. But with Apple, I really just don't think that they currently have the people they need or, I should say, people that are capable of correcting the course that the company is on now, which isn't a good one.

Their quality, especially when it comes mainly to the OS & software has gone downhill and has been doing so for years. But over the past say, 2 years, things just seem to be progressively worse at a much faster pace. Bugs, bugs and more bugs and security issues. We all know the issues, or at least run into some of them - some of us more than others, so some of us see more bugs and issues than others.

But I get your comment and still do agree. My comment is just a hope and whim :)
Also very much agree that there are always going to be more negative comments here, but mostly because they come from people like me that are trying to be critical before things launch publicly (in this case).

I can't install the beta on my work Mac, so I cannot say firsthand if I like the whole new UI. But from everything I keep seeing, it just looks like something they did for the main/sole purpose of just making some visually sweeping change (much more impactful to general users than under-the-hood improvements or features that aren't widely used). So I take the forum comments, YouTube videos and such seriously, but also with a grain of salt.

I do wish though that Apple still had a Mac-first design approach, and not the opposite as it seems now. There are already too many iOS features in Sequoia (Settings, etc). I really just hope they get their old act together and put out some great stuff.
 
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“Spotlight replaces Launchpad, so when you want to open an app, you'll now use Spotlight.“

SAD!! 😢 how about keep launchpad and I can open apps either way that I prefer, as I do now!
 
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I do not want Liquid Ass.

I will switch back to Windows if it comes to it. Apple has been barring Europe from using new functions anyway, so all we will get is a ruined UI, and no functionality.
 
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I remember the flat+bright update and everything was "yuck, is this an OS made for kids?" now people seem to like that and think it's productive and professional. What I'm trying to say we all get used to something and start to like it. I think it will be the same here.
 
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bigpoppa said:
Spotlight has made it more difficult to search my computer for files. I don’t need to search the internet, just find the files I want. Ugh.
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100% this. I've lost count of the times I've gone looking for a file knowing its exact name and still not being able to locate it via Spotlight. It's a complete lost cause if I only know part of the name or get even one character wrong.

Spotlight's insistence on showing me vaguely related internet links instead of my own files means that I do a lot of manual searching. At times I'll try going into an app, creating a new blank file and hitting save to see what folder it defaults to. I use a myriad of sub-folders and bounce between work related and personal stuff a lot so the last saved location is often the wrong one, but sometimes I get lucky and find what Spotlight was never going to show me.

Perhaps the worst offender, however, has always been Apple's own support website. I used to work in the software industry and I spent a lot of time on support pages, but searching directly on apple.com was a complete waste of time. It might show a long list of somewhat related articles above the best one, but many times the page I was looking for simply wasn't there at all. I could look through 4 pages of results and still not get what I wanted. Google, on the other hand, usually had the perfect Apple support article as its second hit. Exact same search criteria, completely different results.

It's almost as if Apple deliberately refuses to figure out how to do search.
 
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1754284640370.png

Welp… Reduce Transparency it is then
 
Bregalad said:
100% this. I've lost count of the times I've gone looking for a file knowing its exact name and still not being able to locate it via Spotlight. It's a complete lost cause if I only know part of the name or get even one character wrong.

Spotlight's insistence on showing me vaguely related internet links instead of my own files means that I do a lot of manual searching. At times I'll try going into an app, creating a new blank file and hitting save to see what folder it defaults to. I use a myriad of sub-folders and bounce between work related and personal stuff a lot so the last saved location is often the wrong one, but sometimes I get lucky and find what Spotlight was never going to show me.

Perhaps the worst offender, however, has always been Apple's own support website. I used to work in the software industry and I spent a lot of time on support pages, but searching directly on apple.com was a complete waste of time. It might show a long list of somewhat related articles above the best one, but many times the page I was looking for simply wasn't there at all. I could look through 4 pages of results and still not get what I wanted. Google, on the other hand, usually had the perfect Apple support article as its second hit. Exact same search criteria, completely different results.

It's almost as if Apple deliberately refuses to figure out how to do search.
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There are several ways to limit searches to your own hard drive. For instance, in Spotlight settings, you can use the Search Privacy and add your drive. That prevents Spotlight from searching the Internet. There are other ways as well, such as just turning off Siri suggestions.
 
"Up until beta 4, Safari had a design where non-active tabs were denoted as such with an underline, while the active tab had none. That's typically not how underlining works, so determining which tab was in use was confusing."

LOL what? That was a KNOWN bug in a single beta. Was never intended to be the UX ever.
 
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bigpoppa said:
Spotlight has made it more difficult to search my computer for files. I don’t need to search the internet, just find the files I want. Ugh.
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On Tahoe, open Spotlight, type in the (partial) filename you're after and then press ⌘2.

All the ⌘ options will show if you hover your mouse over the four icons. Apologies for the crappy screenshot but I had to take a photo of the screen as the Spotlight box would disappear as soon as I tried to screenshot it directly.

IMG_0951.jpeg
 
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BitBLT said:
I didn't think Apple could be more heavy handed than Aqua, but they proved me wrong. I don't think OS UIs should be such a major distraction.
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tbf, it's sites and forums like this that make everything a big distraction
 
I tried the latest public beta of Tahoe on my M4 MacBook Pro and had to remove it. Apple Music and Airplay completely broken. It also refused to load my default desktop picture messing it up completely. Amazingly bad. I submitted a report and then proceeded to remove it. Rest of the system was a great big 'Meh'. The new interface mostly clutters up the windows with unnecessary borders and the sudden appearance of the widgets after I had removed them under Sequoia was irritating. BTW the so called transparency was missing in action, since everything looked the same as before. Anyway, I would warn you not to install this update as it is not finished.
 
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Just_Kevin said:
Thanks,

I've heard about Alfred, not really researched it. From what I have read it sounds like much of what Alfred can do will be built (sherlocked) into OS 26? So I will probably wait it out.
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not really. I gave the new spotlight a go it doesn't accomplish a lot of the things I use Alfred for
 
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